Review. 235
It is possible to believe in folklore, and in Uncle Remus and Ananzi, and much that M. Foulet despises, without trying to make folklore account for everything. The recent edition of Henryson's poems for the Scottish Text Society by Mr. Gregory Smith has called the attention of some readers to Henryson's Fables and the stories of the Fox there. It is remarkable how limited and how literary are Henryson's sources. He knows Caxton's Reynard^ and something besides. But the story of the Fox and the Wolf in the well, which is not in Caxton, he does not take from folklore, nor from the French Eenari, nor from the old English Vox and IVolf. He takes it from Petrus Alphonsus his Disciplina Clericalis, point after point. Henryson really knew very little of the estoire. But if we had not the story in Petrus Alphonsus, it would be easy and natural to take Henryson for a poet spinning rhymes of Reynard out of a large mass of tradition, or out of the roomy old French book instead of Caxton's thin abridgment. But while this case may be a warning to rash folk- lorists not to despise mere literary borrowings and translations, there is still something left over in Henryson which seems to connect his Fables with popular tradition, and that is the name Lowrance given to the Fox. Those popular names of animals, differing from the names in the Roman de Retiari, e.g. " Mikkel " for the Fox in Norway and other countries, "Lowrance," "Tod Lowrie " in Scotland, are signs of an old habit of thought, and belong to that kind of imagination which provides the beast stories of different countries, and also the comic proverbial wisdom of the animals in which Mr. Weller excelled. Students of Reynard should not neglect this addition to the beast epic.
- ' Here's owr mony maisters, as the taid said to the harrow " —
this saying may be found m Machiavelli ; and the Fox appears in the Norwegian Book of Kings, in the Saga of Magnus Bareleg, among the proverbs of Sveinki, " Here's no need of rollers, as the fox said when he drew the harp over the ice." What the Fox said may not be evidence ; still it is worth recording along with the rest of this vanity.
W. P. Ker.
